Your team faces a challenge: you have reached the banks of a wide river. To achieve your long-term goal of plundering the treasures on the other side, you must first meet your short-term goal of crossing the river. For that, you need a strategy.
Strategy requires choice, and that choice is influenced by three key factors: the environment, available resources, and risk appetite. At the water’s edge, potential strategies emerge. You could build a bridge, construct a boat, or wade and swim across. But which option is best?
Data-Driven Decision Making
To make the right strategic choice, you need data and insights into both the environment and your resources. How deep is the river? Do you have enough wood for a bridge? Does your team have the expertise to construct one? Then there is the risk trade-off. Do you prioritize speed or safety? What losses are acceptable?
As the team stands at the riverbank, they look to leadership for direction. Delayed decision-making increases the risk of wasted effort. Some may test the depth, others may start gathering wood, while a few may decide the mission is futile and abandon ship. In business, this scenario plays out when teams operate without clear strategic guidance, leading to inefficiency, disorganization, and attrition.
The Pitfalls of Ignoring Expertise
For the sake of this analogy, let’s assume leadership has access to perfect information. A local elder warns of heavy rain upstream and dangerous currents that make swimming impossible. Rational leadership should focus on available resources and adapt their strategy accordingly. Yet, inevitably, some dismiss expertise. "The old man does not know what he is talking about. I have Google."
With limited resources and time pressure, the worst approach is pursuing multiple strategies simultaneously without clear prioritization. Yet indecisiveness or overconfidence can lead teams to do just that, spreading themselves thin and wasting valuable assets.
Pitch #1 - You could just charge on into the river, but you could ask experts who have stood at the shores and watched others make choices, or who have learned the hard way, which strategies are more likely to result in success. Let’s talk about fractional strategic leadership.
Leadership and Strategic Focus
As night falls, the leadership team debates options. It is a startup, and the team includes a C-level executive who has built strong, reliable bridges, but over years and with significant investment. The founder, recalling childhood experiences, champions rafts. "This river looks just like the one back home. Rafts worked for me before, so they are the answer."
An expert troubleshooter proposes a zipline, a bold yet viable alternative requiring fewer resources. But the founder, unwilling to entertain new ideas, shuts it down. "We are not here to experiment. Rafts are what we are doing."
Pitch #2 - Your experience is limited. You know what you know, but you might be stuck in a mindset that is stopping you from growing. You could ask AI, but how do you know if the answers it is giving you are exceptional?
Execution Over Debate
Once a strategy is chosen, in this case building rafts, the focus must shift to execution. How will the rafts be built? What materials and skills are needed? How can they be used efficiently? At this stage, second-guessing wastes time. While contingency planning and small-scale testing are prudent, constant debate about strategy mid-execution only derails progress.
As a variation of the saying goes, it is foolish to change strategies midstream. The key is making informed, decisive choices early on, then committing resources and effort toward execution. For smaller companies, this means balancing vision with adaptability, expertise with instinct, and decisiveness with openness to new ideas. Because in business, just like at the river’s edge, a well-executed strategy is the difference between success and being left behind on the shore.
Planning without a clear strategy is a waste of resources, especially when those resources are limited. Too often, teams jump into execution without aligning on a strategic direction, leading to wasted time, effort, and capital. Strategy and planning are not the same. Strategy is the foundation that informs planning, ensuring that every decision and resource allocation serves a clear, long-term goal. Without strategy, even the most detailed plans will fail to deliver results.
